LOLA The Spot

The Challenge

LOLA is much more than an e-commerce company, it’s mission is to be a lifelong resource for women—from her first period to her last hot flash. The brand team was working hard to produce quality content, yet the integration between the e-commerce site and blog was completely disjointed.

Deliverables

User research, UX, web interface design, concept and strategy, project management

Goals

+ Increased overall page sessions by +1.39%
+ Increased traffic from shop to blog by 22%
+ Increased SEO for LOLA entitiy

Team

Sarah Argus, Senior Design Manager
Heather Hacker, VP of Product
Lindsey Swedick, Director of Brand Marketing
Jonas Goslow, Word Press Software Engineer

 

  • Research
    We reached out to our community on Instagram to understand what the top questions surrounding reproductive health were. We found that users hadn’t had an opportunity to talk much at all and there were a lot of basic questions and misconceptions surrounding topics of periods, sex, fertility, and menopause.


    Opportunity
    We knew an immediate win for LOLA would be to rebrand the blog, which meant redesigning the identity and rebuilding the site. We had observed that users wanted a space to read expert advice but also ask questions they always had—the blog had potential to be both, while also allowing for seamless product integration.

    Insights
    Frilly pink and flowery branding felt cliche and inappropriate, we needed the design to set a tone that was welcoming and also trusted

    Competitor brands have blogs covering similar content, but the shopping felt too ad-like

    We did not have all the content people were searching for, we needed a space for people to ask their own questions, a unique POS for The Spot

    Long time customers of LOLA didn’t know we had blog, however our data found that readers were more likely to be LOLA customers

    Women often feel alone with their questions and they were seeking a community to communicate with

  • How do you create an omnichannel experience?
    I took a holistic approach rather than focusing solely on The Spot (our blog), ensuring all touch points across the LOLA echo-sphere were updated to support the blog relaunch and to guide the customer through the full content path. For example, on the mylola.com product page I designed a solution to populate relevant content.

    How do people find The Spot (our blog) from mylola.com?
    I redesigned mylola.com’s nav bar into two tiers: (1) a main product nav, solely dedicated to e-commerce and account management, and (2) a secondary service nav, hosting all of our extraneous pages including The Spot.

    How do people find mylola.com from The Spot (our blog)?
    A mini shopping flag which appears sticky at the top right corner of The Spot allows users to quickly navigate to mylola.com.

    How to incorporate shopping into The Spot (our blog)?
    I incorporated shopping in three ways: (1) as mentioned above, we created a sticky “Shop LOLA” flag at the top right of every page, (2) the article template right rail was designed to feature one product, selected by the author, that was most relevant to the article, and (3) the category and search list page was designed to pull in products related to that category or search query.

    How to increase SEO?
    Organic search was a main driver for many of our decisions throughout the project—working closely with an SEO agency to help determine our nav categories, topic placements, and schema markups. In addition to their recommendations, we created a new feature called Ask An Expert, a place for readers to ask questions and get expert advice. The questions, normally asked in Google, are now directly correlating with our blog.

    How to add community?
    Our data showed a thirst for conversation and community, articles and topics sparked more questions and we prioritized our reader’s voice in two ways. I created “Ask An Expert”, an experience for readers to ask questions and get expert answers that they couldn't find elsewhere. Secondly, The Spot would no longer be a one way conversation with the incorporation of a new comment plug-in. At the bottom of every article our community can chat with each other, as well as with our expert panel. In addition to organic engagement, we drive traffic through social media CTAs and our newsletter.

  • Focus Groups
    We hosted monthly breakfasts at the office called “Period Support Groups.” It was here that we got to talk with our audience in a small setting to dig deeper into what they wanted to know. These breakfasts were not only successful for LOLA to gather info, but we heard from attendees that they also gained a lot from attending. This series grew from a user research tactic to a full branded event series.

    Iteration
    Throughout the process we ran internal brainstorms amongst the design, engineering, editorial, and brand to get out all of our ideas on a wall. We wanted The Spot to be more than a blog, we wanted it to be a space for open communication because of what we learned in our focus groups. We narrowed down ideas with an effort vs reward system.

    We started making changes on mylola.com to prep for The Sport launch. In September 2019 we started to include blog content on the product pages, and since December 2019 we’ve redesigned the navigation. We re-launched The Spot mid-May 2020 and immediately started to see positive results. Since the addition of blog content in Sept. 2019 traffic from mylola.com to blog has increased: +22% more users from mylola.com to blog, +20% increase in sessions from mylola.com to blog, and pages per session have increased 1.39%.